


M-theory

by radishwine



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 15:52:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7228879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radishwine/pseuds/radishwine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An old snippet addressing this prompt: "I wonder if Rick is so callous toward Morty because he got too attached to a previous Morty that didn't make it? Maybe he just gets meaner with every Morty in a futile attempt to keep from caring about what he's starting to feel is an inevitable fate."</p>
            </blockquote>





	M-theory

**Author's Note:**

> This was posted on tumblr probably a year ago but I forgot to put it here too.

 

Once you did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and you estimated there to be just over five hundred billion nontrivially distinct ways for a child to die in space.

Dehydration. Starvation. Explosive decompression. Ionic radiation poisoning. Parasitic infection of isometric soul-prints from hell dimensions, apparently. There’s a new one for the books.

He was trying to save you, which is also new, but you refuse to let yourself get all worked up over an isolated aberration, like you did about the one who got cocky and _really_ made a hash of things.

A single data point doesn’t make a line, and in any case, they’re both dead now.

You strap on the backpack and lower the goggles over your eyes.

 

* * *

 

It’s still early days with this one when you bring home his favorite snack. The things look like Cheetos and taste almost exactly like hot dogs. They’re the second pupal stage of the Cannabulan dung fly from dimension 8-D43, but what he doesn’t need to know won’t hurt him.

It never has.

You do it because he loves the crap, and more importantly it gives you something to remember and laugh about on those grinding gray days when even whiskey can’t give you a lift.

But when you hold the bag out to him, he doesn’t take it. Instead, he looks at you with those dumb vacant eyes and rubs at one arm with the other hand as he stutters:

 _He’s not hungry. He just brushed his teeth. He doesn’t like cheetos. He doesn’t like hot dogs. Jerry doesn’t let him snack after 8. He doesn’t even know what those things_ are _._

That’s what he says. _I don’t trust you yet_ \- that’s what you hear, and it’s unacceptable.

You make him eat one anyway.

Thirty seconds later he’s projectile vomiting all over your lab bench. Some of it splashes on your pants, a clump falls in your centrifuge– it’s an unholy mess. Now he’s writhing on the ground whining about nausea and paralysis and hallucinations, but that’s 1. statistically improbable and 2. not your problem. You hate malingerers.

You toss a mop at him and set portal coordinates to an uninhabited dimension. It’s impossible to get any thinking done when your workspace smells like shit and barf.

You take the rest of the fly pupae with you to dispose of safely. It wouldn’t do to let them hatch in a nitrogen-based atmosphere, after all.

Must’ve been a bad batch, you decide as you punt the bag off the side of a cliff.

 

* * *

_They’re all the same_ , you repeat silently. _Perfectly interchangeable._

You know the tenet by heart. Every Rick in the Central Finite Curve knows it–

(You should punch yourself in the nuts for falling into circular reasoning like a common idiot. Obviously belief in T-84a is one of the endless and endlessly stupid variables that constrain the Curve, defined by some Rick Prime in a long-forgotten timestream. Curse the balding old asshole.)

–and the Council knows it best of all. They’ve passed it into law, codified the commodification of their F2 generation. You don’t respect them, but you have to admit there’s a certain genius in bureaucracy: the Council’s true power lies in its absolute control over supply and demand.

Which, of course, they immediately go and ruin with their complete lack of style. They print _coupons_ , for fuck’s sake.

You’ve just spent two hours turning the garage inside out looking for yours. If you’ve lost it somehow– it’s unthinkable, because right now you’re on the Rick-quivalent of house arrest. As in serious lockdown no fuckery allowed, they’ll come after you with laser cannons ablaze if you so much as sniff at another reality.

Alternatively, the algorithm used to generate the barcode would take you a year to crack, give or take a few months.

A year without a shield. Might as well save yourself the hassle and just put a fucking gun to your head already.

But then you do find it. In his room of all places, hidden under a pile of yellowing polaroids. You don’t think about what that means. You don’t look at them. It doesn’t matter which family vacation it was.

_They’re all the same._

You load up a crate of hard A and burn a mixtape of your favorite roadtrip tunes for the long, shitty hyperjump to the Citadel. So what if you proved spectacularly blameless the last time _and_ saved all their skins? Those limp dicks have never trusted you enough to grant you direct portal access.

The ship groans and rattles as you roll into the driveway. No autopilot, no AC- not your finest piece of work, but it’ll have to do.

You carefully steer through the cloud layers to the upper reaches of the exosphere. Just a tip of the throttle at the top, and you’re spilling out into the starry void. You punch it hard, and the stars stretch into a blazing tunnel of light.

You recline the seat and crack the first fifth of many to come.

 _They’re all the same,_ you pick up where you left off, and it’s not a litany against fear, loneliness, or any other emotion you can name but not feel because you’re busy making damn sure you’re too numb for that bullcrap.

Second fifth.

Third.

Time to get some tunes up in here.

 

* * *

 

You’re halfway to Jupiter when the tracker comes back on. You stare at the green light, steadily blinking now where it had been dark for the past two hours. He’s alive, then.

You barely have enough fuel to get home as it is, so you can fucking _forget_ about doubling back to rescue him. And it’s not like the Uranians are sufficiently advanced to have developed portal technology or vehicles capable of faster-than-light travel–

but they may have a compatible fuel source, or materials you can cobble together into a makeshift portal gun, or–

You fumble the flask out of your coat and drain it. You toss it out of the airlock so you don’t break anything vital inside the ship. It’s a real three flask problem, but you haven’t got any more, have you, this was supposed to be a straightforward burglary, steal the stone and peace out, the natives are literally brainless plants, we’ll be back before dinnertime– _simple_.

You should’ve learned by now to never, ever underestimate his capacity for being an utterly worthless fuckup.

He’s alive. What of it?

He saved you once, but he’s also tried to kill you, and _you’ve_ saved _him_ a million times over in a hundred different dimensions, so again, _what of it_?

The tracker beacon blinks at you, bright and green.

You dig around in the litter of bottles at your feet. You find one with a blessed half-inch of liquid left in the bottom. You chug it and turn the ship around.

 

* * *

 

The first thing you see when you drag yourself through the portal is his shocked little face, white as a sheet and wet with tears. For some reason he’s _crying_ and holding one of your shirts, sitting right there in the middle of the cold garage floor. He must’ve been bawling his eyes out for a while, because he looks absolutely sloppy with it. Disgusting.

_What in the everloving fuck is going on?_

He stumbles to his feet. He babbles something about thinking you were dead, which is retarded, because you left him a note saying exactly how long you’d be gone this time–

Oh, _C-128_ Earth time. Not two hours, but two days.

You think you might have said that last part out loud, because he’s turning red and blotchy and suddenly he doesn’t look so desperately sad anymore.

You don’t suppose you can talk your way out of this now.

He flings himself at you, something twisted and painful in his face, and you only have a split second to throw up your arms, a flashback to the last time this happened but last time he had a _gun_ and all you had was a knife and then his eye was hanging from its socket like a rotten fruit, _you did that, and there was b–_

Bitter salt bursting on your tongue. Tears and snot and his hot wet mouth, kissing you like he’s trying to crawl inside of you. Shoving up blindly, tearing your hair, fumbling under your shirt, pressing with all his wiry strength against all your scrapes and bruises and two broken ribs, and you gasp.

You put your trembling hands on his shoulders. You push him away as gently as you can.

Fight or flight. Or fuck. All perfectly natural responses to acute stress. But he’s just a child and you’re not an animal, and you’ll be damned if you let yourself touch him.

He won’t look at you. It’s just as well because you can’t look at him, you can’t think of a single fucking thing to say. It’s the longest, most miserable minute of your long, miserable existence, until:

_No more adventures, please._

And he’s gone.

You slump against the wall and slide down until you hit the floor. 

You’re reaching for your flask before you know what you’re doing. You know by its heft that it’s full. You turn it in your hands and in your mind, constructing models on the fly for predicting the precise way that fluorescent light pools on its polished surfaces and glints off its sharp edges.

You settle it back in its spot in front of your heart.

Not isolated aberrations after all. Black swan events, all three of them, and you call yourself a scientist when you’ve been reaping what you’ve sown all along, the flaws in your framework blinding you to the emergence of the final, terrible pattern. It’s too late, always has been and always will be, and the only thing left to you now is the corrected model, not the truth but the sketch of a shape closer to it than any you’ve been able to delineate before.

Admitting what you’ve done to them, to all of them. It’s the least you can do.  

 _No more adventures._ It’s the least you can do for _him_.

 

(Three weeks later you get a collect call from Squanchy. He tells you about the milk of an equine analogue found on a certain planet in the Tau Ceti system. Dried into a powder and inhaled, it allows you to visually perceive EMR past the Planck length while riding a high a thousand times more powerful than k-lax, with none of the withdrawal symptoms.

There’s just one hangup, but it’s a doozy. Those equine things don’t let any being near them unless they’re virgins. How a fucking alien horse can tell whether you’ve ever gotten your dick wet you can’t even begin to guess, but the fact remains that they gore you to death with a big old horn if you aren’t, and just where in the _universe_ are you going to find a virgin to collect that sweet sweet milk for you—)

 

* * *

 

It’s Jerry who answers the door this time. He squints at you suspiciously and asks if you’re with Jehovah’s Witnesses.

For once you can’t blame the idiot for acting like one. According to the Register of Ricks, the Rick in this dimension died alone and unmemorialized twenty years ago (Mexico, bus stop, freak ketamine overdose, a series of amateur mistakes if there ever was one).

You’re about to remind Jerry exactly whose underaged daughter he knocked up when Summer comes scrambling down the stairs, gets one good look at you and shrieks your name. One point to Summer.

Something shatters in the kitchen. Jerry disappears sideways, confusingly, and then your daughter is barreling into you, almost knocking you ass-backwards onto the concrete step.

You can’t make out what she’s saying with her face smashed all up in your chest. It’s a bunch of loud weepy nonsense, but thank god she’s happy enough to see you that she’s not starting with the tough questions.

Your coat is getting wet. You don’t mind. You pull her in just a bit closer, tucking her soft golden head under your chin. You look into the living room and see the same piss-stained rug and too-small tv and that ugly green couch–

He looks back, confused and slightly frightened. On his face is the same cataclysmically retarded expression that a minute ago you so badly wanted to smack off of Jerry’s. Perfectly blank, perfectly void of recognition.

This isn’t your life. This isn’t your family. This whole world is not your world. Of course he has the same face, but it’s not _his_ face.

Suddenly it feels like you’ve always been here: standing like an idiot in the open doorway with your daughter sobbing in your arms and the rest of them crowding around you, squabbling about bullshit. You can’t look at him.  

You stand there staring at nothing until it blurs, wells over, and runs down your face.


End file.
